Hi,
Just had a power failure, computer down. In earlier versions of Nisus I usually retrieved my crashed file from the Document manager, but this time no sign of it there at all.

This is very sad and annoying; lost 30 minutes of work that I was deeply involved in.

I'd like to ask if this is related to the fact that I have "30 minutes" on my autosave?

My belief was that that those are two different systems, ie., that the crash should still have triggered a document; that Nisus should still be creating on-the-fly temp files all the time, even though I have autosave at 30 minutes.

But maybe I'm wrong. Does Nisus ONLY save every 30 minutes now, because I have autosave? So there's no hope of retrieving crashed files?

But if they are different sysems, any idea where that temp file might have gone or how to access it, or why it didn't make it into the document manager?

I’m afraid I can’t help you retrieve the lost document, unless Time Machine has a version somewhere, but I might just offer a suggestion for the future.

I never rely on auto-saving for anything: I always do manual saving of documents. And I do it frequently — particularly when working with spreadsheets. It's almost a reflex. The general rule of thumb is not to postpone saving beyond the point where alterations you made since the last save cannot easily be reconstructed if necessary. To me, 30 minutes is a very long time.

Further, for really important work, I don’t just save to the computer: I will also drag the file to a USB drive which I always have handy. I wouldn’t do this nearly so often as the saving to the computer, but it’s a useful option that’s faster than my main backup procedure and gives a lot of peace of mind in a small package. Of course, USB drives can fail too…. Actually, though, in my experience it’s usually computer port failure that’s been the problem. This happened to both Firewire ports on one of my previous MacBook Pros, and I’m starting to wonder about one of the USB ports on my current one.

Although an operating system and/or an application may instigate an emergency protocol in the event of a crash, to my mind all bets are off and nothing can be relied on when it comes to a crash. After all, there are many ways in which things can fail, and not all of them are going to involve nice orderly failures.

With a bit of luck, someone else might know where Nisus keeps some invisible files that might help you retrieve your work.